


Anything I Could Have Done

by Cookies_and_Chaos



Category: Cold Case
Genre: Emotional Hurt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lost Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28155189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cookies_and_Chaos/pseuds/Cookies_and_Chaos
Summary: Staring into the bitter cold depths of the Schuylkill, he just wants to know if there's something he could have done. Written for the 12 Days of Christmas Challenge 2020, Day 5, "Five Flowing Waters".
Kudos: 1
Collections: 12 Days of Christmas Challenge 2020





	Anything I Could Have Done

Seconds, minutes, hours. They all the felt the same. Scotty never could say, afterwards, how long he sat or stood, staring into the depths of the Schuylkill. It felt like time both froze and raced on out of his reach at the same time. One day he swore he'd been there for hours but when he looked back at his watch, barely five minutes had gone by. Yet, on another day, he was sure he'd only stopped for a moment and in the time it took for him to blink, day became night and he was shivering from hours in the cold.

Some days the water seems almost clear enough for him to see to the bottom with all the detritus and debris that lay there, and he was never sure if what he saw down there was an illusion of the water or a trick of his own mind. He could stare so intently that his head began to ache and his eyes began to water but he never could work out if what he was seeing was real or not. Other days, the water was murky and churned up, and Scotty always felt like that reflected the workings of his own minds as he turned the same thoughts and memories over and over.

They talked about this during training, how the loved ones of victims tortured themselves with wondering if they could have done anything different. Anything at all. Be it the beating of a butterfly's wings or the force of an avalanche, one action large or small. Could they have done a single thing to stop this tragedy, this pain, coming to pass. Scotty remembered sitting in that training and making notes, so detached as though this were all simply information he would need for someone else, somewhere down the line. Could he have done something as far back as then? Further back even?

Did he make a wrong choice, say the wrong thing, _do_ the wrong thing back when they were just kids?

What made it worse — God, as if anything could make this worse than it already was — was replaying all those times where he reconsidered and doubted their relationship. Replaying the times he was ashamed to say who Elisa was. Replaying all those times where he had bumped into Will or Nick or Lilly when he was with Elisa and immediately feeling as though he had to smooth over who she was, hide and downplay what she was going through. Throwing sleights of hand to distract them so that none of them would ever look too closely.

Thinking about that left him choking on tears and almost hoping that the crushing pain on his chest wasn't just grief, that it might be some kind of retribution from the universe for how he had behaved. People stared, after all, even in Philly, a guy sat on a bench sobbing his heart out isn't something they saw every day.

But none of that changed a damn thing. No matter how long he sat, how hard he thought, how much he regretted every little thing...

Elisa was gone and he would never know if he could have changed any of it.


End file.
